Hillary Clinton has unveiled a new put-down for Bernie Sanders

Hillary Clinton is promoting a new criticism of Sen. Bernie Sanders in her new memoir and the book tour that has followed – that her former Democratic primary challenger is not a Democrat, and therefore didn’t have the party’s best interests in mind.

“He isn’t a Democrat – that’s not a smear, that’s what he says,” Clinton wrote in her book “What Happened.” “He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.”

Clinton went on to say that Sanders is “fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party” and argued that the party has brought about significant progressive change in the US throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

“I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were too,” Clinton wrote.

In an interview on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America” on Tuesday, Clinton argued that Sanders’ independence from the Democratic Party put her in the position of having to defend the party and the president during the primary, wasting precious time she needed to convince progressive voters of the merits of her policy agenda.

“It was difficult to have what I considered to be a fair-minded debate about, ‘Okay we have a successful, two-term president, where do we go from here?’ with somebody who wasn’t a Democrat, who criticized both President Obama and me,” Clinton said.